Ads for the Kinect have taken many different forms. Most of the time, the only disturbing part to me is the headline, “You are the controller.” But in this case, I thought it was noteworthy that the “real” person and her “virtual” counterpart are distinguished only by two physical traits eerily reminiscent of Arian-race ideology: hair and eye color. Notice that the person has dark hair and dark eyes, and her virtual image has blonde hair and blue eyes…

You start to wonder how much control the person really has over her choice of character. Is it not rather that the virtual self-representation shows what’s operative in the subject’s ideological worldview, that the virtual assignation provides the illusion of a free choice while the roots for this decision are already so entrenched as to make that freedom meaningless and the choice over-determined? Is this not, in effect, a forced choice?